The Noun Phrases in the Inaugural Addresses by American Presidents.docx

the noun phrases in the inaugural addresses by american presidentsabstract: this paper studies the noun phrases in the inaugural addresses by american presidents with a view to gaining a more profound understanding of the features of this type of texts. a noun phrase may have a common noun, a proper noun or a pronoun as its head. nominals are also regarded as a type of noun phrase. however, in this paper, the noun phrase includes only common noun headed noun phrases. the other types of noun phrase are excluded for the sake of the size of this research. to carry out the research, the present researcher first followed quirks theory and classified the noun phrases into five categories: head, determiner + head, (determiner) + premodification + head, (determiner) + head + postmodification, and (determiner) + premodification + head + postmodification. then the writer chose five original inaugural addresses made by american presidents to do this mini research. these inaugural addresses included in this research are the addresses by george washington (1789), franklin d. roosevelt (1945), john f. kennedy (1961), theodore roosevelt (1905), and richard m. nixon (1973). quantitative and qualitative analyses generated the following findings:first, of the five types of noun phrases, the type “head + postmodification” is most frequently used, accounting for 33.1% of the total. among the postmodifiers, prepositional phrases account for the major part. moreover, these prepositional phrases are mainly “of” phrases. second, the type of noun phrase with only one word as the head (“head”) is the least frequent type. third, all of these five types of noun phrase appear more frequently in the object position of the sentences. only a small percentage of them function as subjects, and even fewer serve other grammatical functions, such as complements and appositives. qualitative analysis helps find that pronouns and nominal clauses are commonly used as subjects in these inaugural addresses.key words: noun phrase inaugural address text analysis美国总统演讲中的句型特征分析摘要:本文旨在通过对名词短语句法结构和功能的研究，探讨美国总统演说辞的文体特点，帮助我们更好地了解就职演说。本文以著名英国语言学家夸克的理论为基础，将名词短语分成五类进行讨论：中心词，限定词+中心词，（限定词）+前置修饰语+中心词，（限定词）+中心词+后置修饰语，（限定词）+前置修饰语+中心词+后置修饰语。通过定量和定性分析，本文发现美国总统就职演说有以下主要特点：首先，在所有的五篇演说中，带后置修饰语的名词短语最为常用。定性分析发现在“中心词+后置修饰语”当中以“名词+介词短语结构” 最为常见；而且，介词短语中又以“of”引导的介词短语为最常使用。其次，只有中心词的名词短语是最不常用的类型。第三，所有这五类名词短语在句中主要充当宾语成分，只有一小部分作为主语，而作其他成分的，如补语、同位语更少。关键词：名词短语 就职演说 语篇分析1. introductionthe noun phrase plays an important role in texts. they are central to the representation and processing of semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic information in discourse because of the crucial role they play in the domain of reference in discourse (ariel, 1990; clark & wasow, 1998; hickmann, 1995; lambrecht, 1994). syntactically, the noun phrase has several functions, such as subject, object, adverbial, and modifier. semantically the noun phrase includes the major amount of information. due to its linguistic importance, the noun phrase has been the subject of considerable attention in cross-linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of syntactic form/discourse function relations. noun phrases in different texts may show different features. in formal texts, the noun phrases often have more complex structures. according to wang and ding (2005), the noun phrases used in formal texts, such as public speeches, are obviously more complicated than those in texts of informal styles. for example, compared with daily conversations (76%) and impromptu comments (50%), the ratio of the one-component noun phrases in public speeches is relatively low whereas that of the noun phrases with three or more components is high. the inaugural addresses by american presidents belong to a particular type of texts. do the noun phrases in these addresses have more complex structures? what other features do the noun phrases in these addresses bear? the present study was designed to answer these questions.this paper contains five parts. part one introduces the whole paper; part two reviews the theory of the noun phrase and the existing research related to inaugural addresses; part three explains the method to do this mini research. part four, the main part of this paper, deals with the statistical analysis of the noun phrases in the inaugural addresses by american presidents. part five concludes the whole paper. 2. literature reviewthis part consists of three sections and dwells on the review of related theories and empirical studies that have been conducted in both the fields of noun phrases and inaugural addresses. section one deals with the structure of noun phrases and some basic terms that will be frequently referred to in this study. section two reviews some empirical research on the noun phrase. section three discusses previous research into the inaugural addresses.2.1 quirks research into the structure of noun phrasesaccording to quirk（1979）, the noun phrase can be simple and include only one word. it can also be rather complicated and include embedded predications. in quirks theory, the structure of noun phrases includes determiners, premodifiers, head, and postmodifiers.1) determiners. determiners include possessive determiners (my, our, etc), definite articles (the, this, that, etc), indefinite articles (a, an), genitives (johns), demonstratives (this, that, such), interrogative determiners (what, which, whose), indefinite determiners (no, some, each, all, both, half, many, etc.), cardinal numerals and ordinal numerals, multiplicative numerals and fractional numerals, and quantifiers (a lot of, plenty of, etc.).2) premodifiers. premodifiers comprise all the modifying items placed before the headnotably adjectives and nouns. for example:the pretty girl some pretty college girls3) head. this refers to the word around which the other components cluster and which dictates concord and other kinds of congruence with the rest of the sentence outside the noun phrase. the following are some examples:the pretty girl standing in the corneris the pretty girls standing in the cornerare he frightened the pretty girl standing in the corner 4) postmodifiers. postmodifiers comprise all the items placed after the head notably prepositional phrases, non-finite clauses, and relative clauses: e.g.the girl in the cornerthe girl standing in the cornerthe girl who stood in the corner2.2 empirical research on the noun phrasethe noun phrase, as an important part in language, has been studied from the perspective of complexity, an aspect considered as an especially significant index of style. noun phrase complexity is a particularly useful stylistic device, with important implications for the description and differentiation of varieties of language. in 1970s, aarts was one of the first to study noun phrase complexity in relation to language variation. in 1971 he published a short but influential article entitled on the distribution of noun phrase in english clause structure in which he reported the research undertaken to demonstrate the non-randomness in the distribution of noun phrase types in the english clause structure. his working hypothesis (aarts, 1971) was that the distribution of noun phrase types within the english clause structure is not random, but that subject position is associated with structurally light noun phrases, whereas non-subject positions are associated with structurally heavy noun phrases. for him, light noun phrases are those noun phrases consisting of a simple pronoun, a name or an unmodified noun with or without a determiner. all other noun phrases are understood to be heavy. he further hypothesized that the distribution pattern would be significantly influenced by the variety of english in which the noun phrase occurs.2.3 research on the inaugural addressesinaugural addresses, as a special type of the public speech, have aroused the interest of many linguists and scholars. the following sections will review the research that has been carried out on the non-linguistic aspects of the inaugural addresses and then the research on the linguistic aspects (including the features of noun phrases) of the inaugural addresses. 2.3.1 non linguistic aspects of the inaugural addressesa few linguists and scholars have done some research into the inaugural addresses by american presidents. among them, some have explored the inaugural addresses from a political perspective (zi, 2005). they have found out the change of americas policy through these speeches, especially the change of different kinds of democracy in peoples daily life. for example, j.f. roosevelts address emphasizes the freedom of the mass media. anyway, some (zhang, 2006) read from these addresses that the democracy american presidents advocates is one-sided because they claim that only america has the true human rights and they always press their values on others. some scholars (xiong, 2006) even analyze religion in the addresses. religion is a very important part of the western culture. the doctrines of the bible greatly influence the life and ideology of the west. american presidential inaugural addresses inevitably involves much religious color, which contributes a lot to the incitement of these inaugural addresses.2.3.2 linguistic features of inaugural addressesliu (2005) has probed into the rhetoric features of the inaugural addresses. according to his analysis, these addresses pay much attention to the usage of euphemism, simile, and rhyme and so on. zheng (2004) has made a general research on bushs inaugural address, in which parallelism, repetition, alliteration and assonance, metaphor, parody and allusion are discussed. li (2004) has analyzed the language of j.f. kennedys address from two aspects, the logical feature and the rhetoric devices. as to rhetoric devices, she mentioned metaphor, synecdoche, antithesis, hyperbole, the abstract for the concrete, alliteration, repetition, paradox, climax, chiasmus, and litotes. ren (2006) has also conducted a study on j.f. kennedys address. he summarizes the rhetoric devices in six aspects, including parallelism, repetition, alliteration, antithesis, metaphor, synecdoche and citation. in the book introduction to english stylistics (wang & ding, 2005), the authors hold that the speechmaker uses different language styles in accordance with the backgrounds (occupation, gender and education) of the speechmaker, the aims of the speech, and the audience. they make a detailed analysis of the first inaugural address by franklin d. roosevelt and the famous speech made by martin luther king from six aspects: syntax structure, vocabulary, phonetics and rhetoric device. however, due to the limited length, their detailed analysis is only within the beginning part of the two speeches. to study the syntactic structures of these inaugural addresses, the authors have focused on the structures of the noun phrases. they made a detail analysis on the beginning part of the two speeches, the findings shown in the following table.table 2.1 number of components in the noun phrases in the speeches by roosevelt and luther kingtype of the noun phrasenumber(speech one)percentagenumber(speech two)percentageone components2044.4%3635%two components920%2221.3%three components1022.2%3534%four components511.1%87.7%five components12.2%11%six components11%total 45100%103100%this study found that the noun phrases used in these inaugural addresses are obviously more complicated than in other styles. the premodifiers are not so complex, but the postmodifiers are much more intricate. moreover, the noun phrases in theses inaugural addresses tend to include “of-genitive” instead of “-s genitive”, which according to the authors, makes the language of the speech more solemn and the content more serious. “of-genitive” is also believed to show emphasis. the review of the literature above shows that although much has been done on the inaugural address little has been carried out on the features of the noun phrases that are used in these addresses. this indicates the significance of the present study.3. methodologythis part consists of three sections and dwells on the research design of the present study. section one deals with the definition of noun phrase. section two discusses the data that were analyzed in this study. section three discusses the framework of analysis. section four explains the procedures of data analysis.3.1 operational definition of the noun phrasetraditionally, the noun phrase may be those having common nouns, proper nouns, pronouns as heads. the nominal is also included in the noun phrase by some grammarians. however, in this paper, the noun phrase includes only common noun headed noun phrases whereas the other types of noun phrase are excluded for the sake of size of the research. the following are some examples of the noun phrases included or excluded in this study.included: the central question, this era we are about to enter, a nation, etc. excluded: vice president mondale, reverend moomaw, we, ask what you can do for your country, etc.3.2 texts analyzedto carry out this mini research, the writer chose five original inaugural addresses by american presidents. these inaugural addresses are the addresses by george washington (1789), franklin d. roosevelt (1945), john f. kennedy (1961), theodore roosevelt (1905), and richard m. nixon (1973). table 1 shows the title and the total number of words of each address.table 3.1. five inaugural addresses analyzed in this studyaddressnumber of wordsgeorge washington (1789)1435franklin d. roosevelt (1945)558john f. kennedy (1961)1365theodore roosevelt (1905)983richard m. nixon (1973)1802five inaugural addresses have been chosen for the following reasons: first, the writer of this paper is a green hand in linguistics. limited knowledge in both the theory and research method does not allow too much analytic work. second, this is a graduation thesis which has a limitation on the number of size. third, theres a time limit to finish the thesis. too much analytic work will delay the completion of the thesis.3.3 framework of analysisbritish linguist quirk r. (1979) is a preeminent in linguistics. and his book a university grammar of english is well known and widely accepted in the world as authority. their classification of the noun phrase in this book has been borrowed by many researchers. therefore, this paper will apply their framework to analyze the data. according to quirks theory, the structure of noun phrases can be described as shown in the following table:table 3.2 the structure of the noun phrase described by quirkdeterminativepremodificationheadpostmodificationhimalicesweddingthatgirlwith the red hairall thosefine warmdaysin the country last yearabetterstorythebesttripagoodtripthat i once hadbased on the description by quirk, the noun phrases can be classified into five types: head (h), determinative + head (d + h), (determinative) + premodification + head (d) + prem + h), (determinative) + head + postmodification (d) + h + post), (determinative) + premodification + head + postmodification (d) + prem + h + postm). the following are the five categories of noun phrases with examples from richard m. nixons inaugural address in 1973.1. h: peace2. d + h: the world3. (d) + prem + h: the central question4. (d) + h + post: this era we are about to enter5. (d) + prem + h + post: our new policies for peace3.4 procedures of analysis1) identification of the noun phrasein this study, only common noun headed phrases were included whereas nominals and those headed by pronouns and proper nouns were excluded. therefore, the first thing the writer had to do is to identify all the common noun headed noun phrases in the five addresses. the identification was based on the operational definition (see section 3.1). after identifying all the noun phrases, the writer classified them into five categories. the classification was carried out according to the framework of analysis discussed in section 3.2.2) finding the frequencies of each type of the noun phraseafter the identification and classification, the write counted both the total number of the noun phrases and that of each of the five types of noun phrases. 4. analysis of the noun phrases in the inaugural addresses this part reports and discusses the findings of the present research. it consists of two sections. section one reports the findings of the noun phrases in terms of syntactic structures. section two deals with the findings of the noun phrases in terms of syntactic functions.4.1 the noun phrase in terms of structures in this section, the writer will analyze the noun phrases in two waysquantitative and qualitative, and then report the findings of these two types of analysis respectively.4.1.1 quantitative analysisthe results of the quantitative analysis of the noun phrases in the five chosen inaugural addresses by american presidents are summarized in table 4.1. table 4.1. frequencies of the five types of the noun phrases in the 5 inaugural addressesstructurenixont. rooseveltwashingtonf. rooseveltj. f. kennedytotalh23 (11.1%)12 (10.4%)7 (4.7%)11 (18.6%)15 (9.5%)68 (9.9%)d + h67 (32.2%)26 (22.6%)42 (28.4%)17 (28.8%)50 (31.6%)202 (29.4%)(d) + prem + h34 (16.3%)18 (15.7%)27 (18.2%)10 (16.9%)24 (15.2%)113 (16.4%)(d) + h + post66 (31.7%)46 (40.0%)52 (35.1%)17 (28.8%)47 (29.7%)228 (33.1%)(d) + prem + h + post18 (8.7%)13 (11.3%)20 (13.5%)4 (6.8%)22 (13.9%)77 (11.2%)total 208 (100%)115 (100%)1